Strategic Planning

Let's face it…when we operate a business online, there's a certain segment of the population that looks on us with suspicion. It seems as though everyday I receive another warning in my Inbox about the scams, tricks and schemes of unscrupulous Internet marketers.

But we're not there, right? I believe that the majority of Internet marketing companies hold themselves to a high ethical standard. They offer quality products and services and truly want to develop good, long-term relationships with their clients.

So how do we 'rise above the rest'? How do we present ourselves to the world in a way that inspires trust, not suspicion? There are the obvious ways - we keep our sales copy fresh and exciting, without being misleading. We deliver what we say we're going to, without excuse. We follow up on complaints and make sure we stay connected to our clients. And most of all, we pr...

How important is a business proposal? For one, it gives you a head start in starting up your desired restaurant business. You see, before the bank or the lending company will give their nod of approval for your proposed loan, you have to actually convince them first that you deserve the money. Without it, you wouldn’t have enough startup capital to buy the much needed equipment and supplies and pay your expenses, such as salary to your employees and advertising costs. Yet how do we exactly go about the business proposal? Consider the following suggestions:

1. If you are a novice in writing business proposals, then don’t be afraid to get some extra help from the experts. You can ask for different strategies on how to write them, such as what clicks and what doesn't to the intended readers. Luckily, for those who are just too shy to approach anyone, there are numerous computer pro...

What are the factors that need to be considered when looking at hot desking? This paper looks at the definition and factors involved in this type of working model.

What is hot desking? – The provision of shared working space, where desks, PC, telephone are provided on an ‘as-required’ basis not on a ‘one-to-one’ basis. With the growth of mobile services, hot desking can also include the routing of voice and other messaging services to any location where the user is able to log in to their secure corporate network. Therefore telephone number, email and instant messaging can be routed to their location on the network and no longer to just one physical desk.

Why should I consider hot desking?

• Most office desks are used 60% of a working day, with 4 hours being the maximum time an individual is likely to occupy a seat continuously.
• The cost of...

How do I assess my true office accommodation costs?

We have been asked by a number of clients to help them identify the true cost of an office or location. Here is a guide to the factors you should consider to assess total accommodation costs.

The UK Department of Trade and Industry commissioned a report into remote working in 2005 and found that a significant operational cost reduction was achieved.

In a recent report the following figures were published from a study of 13 large corporations, spanning some 30 teams (1.0)

• 86% of managers and 74% of staff spend time out of the office during any month.

• An average office worker spends 10-20% of time away from their desk.

Taking the above we can calculate, in rough terms, the expected usage of accommodation to staff ratio. (This is only a guide and further study of any organisation will be required....

Options for Development and How to Utilize Your Plan

If you're starting a business, you're going to need a sound plan that outlines each aspect of your enterprise. First, you must consider who is going to create your plan. You have two basic options—you can hire an expert to write it or you can develop your own.

If you decide to write the plan yourself, you'll find numerous websites that provide free outlines and guidance. Taking on the job yourself can be intimidating, especially if you've never written a plan before. This document is, after all, the most important paper you'll possess when it comes to raising money for your new business, understanding all of the intricacies involved in creating and running your company and planning for its future growth.

Ask friends who already run successful businesses if you can see their plans or if they will take a look at your...

There are two approaches to gaining knowledge about the building trade industry. One method you can use it to go to contractor license school. The other is through practical experience and on the job training. To really stand out in your chosen trade, requires both.

When going to contractor license school, you have to learn the contractor license course, which includes a extensive assortment of subjects related to the construction industry. This means you have to choose which one of the 43 classifications of contractor license you would like to specialize in.

The contractor license course are classified into 3 major groups, Class A, Class B and Class C. Class A is for general engineering contractor, Class B is for general building contractor and Class C is for specialty contractor.

Class C includes the following sub classifications:

- Insulation and acous...

Strategies in small business are as important as they are in the Corporate Board Rooms of America’s greatest companies. Believe me when I tell you that you need to strategize to win you market and if you wish to increase your market share you need a plan of attack and you need to execute that plan and win. Small businesses in local communities are often an extension of the personalities of the business owner or owners and employees.

Many times small businesses do things because they think it is cool or the right thing to do and do not consider their profit margins and what will make the most money. I am not attempting to tell you to by-pass the community and scrape the cream only off the top, screw the community and get filthy rich without giving back. What I wish to say is much deeper than the pettiness of either side of such a debate.

You see, it is not an either or but ...

INTRODUCTION

Do you have inventory accuracy problems? Typical symptoms:

• Lots of inventory errors
• Surprise backorders, unplanned shortages, "lost material"
• Nobody believes the records-- numerous calls to "check" on availability
• Air freight bill exceeds the national debt
• Nasty financial reporting "surprises"
• Lack of consensus on importance of accuracy
• Lack of consensus on how to measure it
• Inability to reconcile inventories, cycle counts
• Error causes largely unknown
• Weak/no company tradition of data accuracy
• New systems/software implementation causing more confusion

Solution recommendations are presented as follows…

ORGANIZE PROJECT

Results are usually best when there is a bit of a crisis atmosphere established. Business as usual won't usually serve to get s...

Technology & HR-Leverage one for the other: "Technology and HR are enablers of business. Integration of the two would mean not only harmonious co-existence but also leveraging one for the other. Leveraging of technology for HR would mean digitizing the mundane HR activities and automating the back office and transactional activities related to recruitment, performance management, career planning, and succession planning, training and knowledge management. Leveraging HR for technology implies managing change associated with technology by way of communication, training, hiring, retraining, stakeholder analysis and conscious keeping. Thus they can play complementary roles."

Technology and HR both have one thing common i.e., both these are enablers of business.

In recent times, technology has become synonymous with information technology, as hardly any other technological dev...

Today integrating technology is the buzzword, business leaders across the world can’t stop discussing about how technology will transform our present business environment. How tech savvy companies will extinct the rudimentary one. Learning from late nineties dotcom bust, we know technology is no one pill panacea for business problems but a tool which make our management efficient and effective. Technology enables us to have more information to take our decisions but it can’t take our decision. The decisions still has to be taken by humans behind it.

Management faces some real time difficulties in managing technology – the foremost among them is - when is the right time to invest in technology. Most business fear to invest at present stage as they believe that technology is changing so fast that investment made today will become rudimentary in the near future and the investments ...

Have you just been promoted CEO/Director or General Manager? Congratulations and welcome to the world of strategizing! Now you can doze early, wake late, play golf, cancel meetings and go to Bahamas. On company time!

But I bet you're nervous. While your old job focuses on specialized tasks, your new position frees your mind to explore the business' macro perspective. You'll be steering the ship from the captain's chair. Creating a vision will be your mandate. And strategizing will take about 110% of your working hours. Does that much freedom cause abnormal wetting of the pants? If so, resign. If not... read on. You got a lot of strategizing to do.

So what exactly is strategy? Most managers define it vaguely as "a plan".I see it more precisely as a grand design to employ means and resources to achieve specific ends.

The CEO is paid handsomely to create a fit between ...

Malcolm Muggeridge is quoted as saying that only dead fish swim with the stream. I was reminded of this truth yesterday as we enjoy the beautiful summer day by taking a walk for the neighborhood. A small stream flows under our street a few yards down from our house. The afternoon sun illuminated a small portion of the stream where between the surface and the bottom a school of small fish provided some intellectual entertainment. Dozens of these fish no more than 2 inches long were swimming aggressively against the current as if their life depended on it. One might think their ultimate destination was upstream. The truth is their journey was going to take them down stream where they eventually would join the Great Lakes.

It seems logical that they could get to the Great Lakes quicker if they would turn around and use the same energy to swim downstream. However as I watched ...

Hoping people will buy your published material or products will be the death of your business! No longer is the traditional one-way publishing model or company-centric thinking acceptable or profitable. According to Mark Rousseau, General Manager for Findlaw/Lexpert at Thomson Carswell, "You need to find out what the client’s needs are and develop products and services to address those needs to succeed in today’s business world."

Let’s take for example, Mark Rousseau’s growth mandate of 30% compounded growth over the next 5 years. How does he plan to achieve this? According to Mark, they are undertaking a number of business development initiatives to meet their division’s growth objective.

Thomson Carswell acquired Lexpert Magazine in 2004 from entrepreneur and publisher John Alexander Black and hired Mark Rousseau who has more than 20 years of ...

The use of self-serve checkouts continues to grow at an astronomical rate. Last year consumer spending at self-serve checkouts was up 35% over 2004.

When the concept of self-serve checkouts was first developed, retailers saw it as an opportunity to reduce the number of cashiers required to operate a store. All retailers placed a big emphasis on the security aspects of having customers ring up their own purchases. However the biggest impact to date has been the effect of self-serve checkouts on candy and magazine sales.

According to a study from IHL Consulting Group, consumers using self-serve checkouts are able to overcome the impulse of buying gum, candy, and magazines at a rate of 45.4% less than at full serve checkouts.

Properly accounting for change

When change is contemplated it is important to look at all aspects from a strategic point of view. ...

Once the dominant discounter in the United States, Canada, Japan, Czech Republic, and Australia, Kmart has gone through a disappearing reminiscent of a teenage party at Camp Crystal Lake in the Friday the Thirteenth movie series. One-by-one, country-by-country the Kmart banner has vanished.

Analysts have long been waiting for an announcement from Chicago-based Sears Holding Company would be replaced with a different format. Many thought it was a inevitable once an attempt to developing the platform called Sears Essentials was announced. However lack of testing the concept before deploying dozens of stores nationwide prevented a proper learning curve, keeping the concept from being successful. The stores were located in former Kmart units; however experts agree they were not able to produce the same revenue as her predecessor. The stores will be transformed into the Sears Gra...

If you are a business plan writer planning how to start a new business, you have to make some assumptions. For those assumptions to have some credibility, you should be aware of industry metrics. Unless the business you are starting is truly the first of its kind on the planet, you should be able to find some metrics based on what is typical for the type of business you are planning.

As an example, fast service restaurants likely have developed correlations between traffic and sales. There is a reason why these types of restaurants are located on busy streets. A certain amount of the cars that are passing will stop and each car that stops will make an average purchase. These three numbers - the traffic count, the percentage of those cars that will pull in and the average purchase per car – should give you an average sales figure to benchmark your own projections against. If yo...

Is Your Annual Strategic Planning Process Done?

Generally if you have more than about a dozen people in your company you need to have an annual strategic planning process. With a small management team of three or four people it is not very difficult, and will likely go quickly because you discuss these things daily. The trick is to look at the longer-term (at least a year) in the context of a 3-5 year vision for the company. As the company gets bigger the time invested will get bigger too, but either way it will pay big dividends and needs to be done.

I recently attended a leadership seminar doing research to add a “Leadership” segment to our CEO & Entrepreneurship Boot Camp. This instructor said that at a recent corporate training with about thirty people from the same company, including the CEO the instructor simply asked who understood the goals of the corporation fo...

INTRODUCTION

Objective:

• To help enable process improvement for better performance—do it better, cheaper, faster.

Would you like a simple, effective approach to process improvement? This is a generic method for almost any type of process and is intended as a guide of things to do, rather than an in-depth tutorial. Because it’s generic, it doesn’t contain discipline-specific technical advice. While it outlines a methodical approach, we also encourage creativity in concert with it, because the biggest breakthroughs happen when method and creativity find a way to co-exist.

This article first defines key terms, then discusses how to improve inputs to the process, the process itself, and wraps up with some “lessons learned” advice. Although production and manufacturing terms are employed, nearly everything herein works for se...

Does your company need to improve inventory accuracy?

Often, writings on inventory accuracy improvement focus on techniques, such as cycle counting. While this is a very important item in the toolkit of the inventory or materials professional, cycle counting is only mainly a measurement and diagnostic tool. Think of it as SPC (Statistical Process Control) for inventory accuracy. You probably aren’t going to cycle count your way to inventory accuracy, without also making major improvements in the material handling, transaction control, reporting and feedback process. For many companies, using cycle count adjustments to correct inventory record errors is like trying to bail out the ocean with a spoon, since errors may be made far faster than they can be economically corrected.

So what should you do?

An effective inventory accuracy progra...

If you do not know where you want to reach, it does not matter the way you choose. When you decide your business positioning, you actually set the marketing strategy of your business. All your marketing activities will be planned and implemented to achieve this goal.

Having a business positioning strategy, is actually having a high level guidelines that keeps your business essence consistent. The business essence includes the interaction with customers, vendors, suppliers, employees etc'. The consistent business behavior that your business expresses is what your target customers and consumers receive. This is the way your customers will recognize you and choose your products or services on top of your competitors.

There is a very simple question that if you do not know the answer for it, there is no justification for your business to exist.
Why should you buy a pro...